Links of the day : 28 - 07 - 2015

Today's links 28/07/2015: Standard #Conference, #HPC #architecture evolution, #Rowhammer #security attack in #javascript

• International Conference on Standardization and Innovation : 13-14 November 2014 @ CERN, Geneva
• Reading the Tea-Leaves: How Architecture Has Evolved at the High End : Interesting perspective on the current evolution of HPC and how power consumption is driving current and future generation design as supercomputer hit the power density wall before the compute density one.
• Rowhammer made simple : DRAM attack Rowhammer.js coming to browser or server with javascript near you soon :)

Links of the day 23 - 05 - 2015

Today's links 23/05/2015: #EC2 + #docker = #PaaS , cpu pipeline side channel attack, packetized memory interfaces

• Empire : self-hosted PaaS called Empire. Empire provides a 12 factor-compatible, Docker-based container cluster built on top of Amazon's robust EC2 Container Service(ECS), complete with a full-featured command line interface.
• Hardware Side Channels in the Cloud : attacks which targets co-located virtual machines in the cloud. This attack exploits the CPU’s pipeline as opposed to cache tiers which are often used in side channel attacks.
• Applications for Packetized Memory Interfaces : interesting thesis where teh author propose to abstract away the underlying timing characteristics of the memory technology and allow greater flexibility in the design of memory hierarchies by using packetized memory. However i am not sure yet how this differ from Numascale and consort.. 

Links of the day 20 - 07 - 2015

Today's links 20/07/2015: Optimization tools, lock-free queue, distributed system testing framework, functional programming guide

• Google Optimization Tools : Google's software suite for combinatorial optimization
• SnapQueue : Lock-Free Queue with Constant Time Snapshots
• Conductor : A system for testing distributed systems across a network
• mostly-adequate-guide : Mostly adequate guide to Functional programming (in javascript)
  

Links of the day 14 - 07 - 2015

Today's links 14/07/2015: #google cluster data, Usenix and Hotstorage conference and papers.

• Cluster data : The clusterdata-2011-2 trace represents 29 day's worth of cell information from May 2011, on a cluster of about 11k machines at google.
• Failure and characterization of jobs at google : publication using the above dataset.
• Usenix and Hotstorage : Usenix conference , notable paper: 
• Grappa : enables users to program a cluster as if it were a single, large, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) machine. Performance scales up even for applications that have poor locality and input-dependent load distribution. Grappa addresses deficiencies of previous DSM systems by exploiting application parallelism, trading off latency for throughput [website] .
• mARC : an improved ARC cache mechanism
• BeeHive : erasure code with even more fault tolerance built in

Links of the day 13 - 07 - 2015

Today's links 13/07/2015: 2015 #Go and #Cloud conference, File System crash consistency

• hotcloud : 2015 usenix hotcloud conference. Some interesting stuff, but nothing groundbreaking.
• GopherCon : 2015 Go conference. Too bad i can't find the slidedeck or video :(
• Crash Consistency : ACM queue article on Rethinking the Fundamental Abstractions of the File System

Links of the day 08 - 07 - 2015

Links of the day 08/07/2015: Storage tipping point, SSL, reverse proxy, #Container with the virtualization goodies on top ( or under )

• The Storage Tipping Point -- the performance optimization technologies of the last decade – log structured file systems, coalesced writes, out-of-place updates and, soon, byte-addressable NVRAM – are conflicting with similar-but-different techniques used in SSDs and arrays. The software we use is written for dumb storage; we're getting smart storage; but smart+smart = fragmentation, write amplification, and over-consumption.
• s2n -- Amazon's open source ssl implementation.
• pushpin -- a reverse proxy server that makes it easy to implement WebSocket, HTTP streaming, and HTTP long-polling services. It communicates with backend web applications using regular, short-lived HTTP requests (GRIP protocol). This allows backend applications to be written in any language and use any webserver.
• Hyper : Make VM run like Container. Fast as Container, Isolated by VM. Intersting approach, Upon the RUN command, Hyper launches a new VM instance, instead of containers, and mount the specified image onto the instance. Inside to the VM, a minimalist Linux kernel, called HyperKernel, is booted. HyperKernel is built with a tiny Init service, called HyperStart, which creates a Pod, setup Mountnamespace, and launch apps from the loaded image.

Links of the day 07 - 07 - 2015

Links of the day 07/07/2015 : brittle vs ductile systems, leader election, testing distributed system, Non blocking algo and multicore programming

• Brittle : very good overview on why current obsession with fault tolerant system are a lot more expensive than a non-fault-tolerant system that (most of the time) does the same job. And worse when they fail the failure is catastrophic. The authors advocate that we need to move toward ductile system - system that are able to strech even under failure, while it might break it provides enough warning enabling the catastrophic failure scenario and the associated cost.
• Fast Leader election without tournament : very good Microsoft research paper on how to solve the leader election without the classic tournament approach.
• Distributed system testing : ACM queue article on the approaches and challenges of testing distributed systems. 
• Nonblocking Algorithms & Scalable Multicore Programming : from the fantastic paper we love meetup, Devon tells us: "Apart from being a fantastic primer on designing portable concurrent data structures, this well-sourced paper provides a number of captivating ideas on thinking about, modeling, and solving concurrency and contention problems."

Links of the day 06 - 07 - 2015

Today's links 06/07/2015:  #NoSQL meet #SQL (sometimes on #Hadoop ), Accessibility and load testing

I had a little bit of link backlog (been really busy for a week) sorry if some of those feel a little bit stale over the next couple of days.

• Crate : A middle ground between a relational DB and a distributed NoSQL store that supports horizontal sharding and semi-structured object definitions.
• Impala : SQL on top of Hadoop using CRAP, aka Create, Read, and APpend, (note the absence of update and delete capabilities).
• tota11y : an accessibility visualization toolkit
• Locust : open source load testing tool